"Belonged" probably isn't the right word, but .400 ish is where they were for around 4 months out of the six month season. That's not taking anything away from what they accomplished in December and January, but from a statistical standpoint you'd have to call that streak a bit of an outlier -- they definitely over performed.
The 13-game winning streak was, by far, the easiest stretch of the team's schedule last year. 10 of the 13 wins were at home. And one of the three road wins was a buzzer beater over a crappy Memphis team that was starting Damon at PG and Darko at center. Yes, they beat Utah twice during the early part of the streak, but Utah was playing like crap then. They were in the middle of a 6 game losing streak, and were barely 0.500 for the season in spite of a 7-2 start and went 5-11 for the month of December. The Blazers weren't the only ones beating them in December 2007. Utah didn't turn their season around until January. There were a few home wins over quality opponenets during the streak, but you have to remember the team played well at home all season - and struggled on the road. Come January, the schedule was much tougher with a lot more road games. All young teams struggle on the road. It's to be expected. BNM
But that's not the right way to analyze...which stretch was an outlier and which was representative. The way to analyze is to take the entire sample...which has both good and bad outliers. They weren't as good as their winning streak, but they also had a very bad stretch in the second half which wasn't representative. Overall, they finished about .500, which I'd say is probably representative.
There are always residuals, but if the point is that the December to mid January stretch stands out in particular; nowhere else in their schedule did they post such a large disparity for so long (above or below their season average). I admit I haven't done any kind of in depth regression analysis to see how much of an outlier the win streak was, and I'm relying quite a bit on hunch and best recollection, so I could certainly be wrong. Hmmm ... Actually I think I'm going to create a scatter plot of their daily average winning percentage throughout last season and see what comes up, I'll post it here if people are interested.
We lost our sense of urgency like Aruba lost Natalie Holloway. No but seriously, we just weren't good enough and not skilled enough last season to overcome other teams.
Well, for what it's worth, I do think it was a major outlier. But in analyzing performance (from what I've read from actual stats geeks...I have no training personally, beyond standard college stats classes), you generally don't worry about the "shape" of the distribution, just what was accomplished. For a hitter in baseball, if they had a really hot June, but were below-average the rest of the year, you don't throw out June as an outlier...you let it have as much effect as one month of performance should have, regardless of whether it's all concentrated in one month, or distributed across the six months. It still matters as much in telling you about the player's ability. Similarly, I don't think the shape of the wins distribution matters a great deal for the Blazers last year. I don't think the Blazers were better or worse than a team that won the same number of games, but spread those wins out more consistently.
A team of streak shooters that was way too reliant on outside shooting. During the streak, Blake was hot and Jones was actually our best SF...but we were playing without much margin for error. When Blake went cold and Jones' knee went wonky, the Blazers weren't the same team.
Aren't we relying on outside shooting this season too? I guess what I'm asking is... are we really the 2nd best team in the West and will we keep this up? Or are we about to fall off the map like we did last season too?
You're right the shape of the distribution doesn't really matter because of the diminishing effect that each additional win or loss has on the overall record which ended up hovering right around .500 from March onward (give or take 2 or 3 percent). What is interesting is to break the season down into 6 classes: in this case I just looked at the record by month. When you take the mean of the average win % for all months you end up with the following: October-November: 31% December: 87% January: 57% February: 36% March: 47% April: 38% The mean of those monthly winning percentages is 49.1% (off of the true 50% value because each month has slightly differing numbers of games and April unfairly weights the mean) and the median (which corrects for outliers) is at 42% which is the "average" level of expected performance I was trying to describe on a hunch.
Last I checked Portland was making more then two 3's more per game then last year and shooting them at a much better % too. Hopefully they continue to fare better with the luck of the health draw then they did last year when Jones went down. To me, Rudy has replaced Jones's threat and then some. STOMP
They're going to finish second to last only in front of OKC. Seriously, how the hell should we know what this team is going to do over the stretch? On a more cheerful note, the fact that they aren't relying on huge win streaks and suffering through long droughts tells me that they are more consistent, and therefore probably more likely to sustain this effort than last years. Will they finish second in the West? I'd guess probably not, but I do think they'll win at least 50 games and be at least in the playoffs, which should make all of us happy.
It started with Nate tinkering too much with what was working and then our young guys hit the wall and then The Dark Lord gazed out from his tower and sent hordes of Orcs and Wargs and...uh never mind, I got sidetracked there.
We are still shooting way more jumpers than is healthy - but we are a lot less reliant on it this year than last year. Based on Joel's improved offensive production, Roy's higher FT rate and Oden's 8 PPG we get about 12 more PPG this year that are not jump-shots, but we lost about 5 PPG from Jack that were from drives/FT - so we are still getting 7 more none-jump shots per game. Add the fact that we are no longer out-rebounded as we were last year - and we are a lot less likely to have a big implosion as we did last year. Personally, I expect Greg to get better as the year goes on - so hopefully there are 3 - 6 more PPG that are not jump-shots we will get - and I am willing to bet we will see Bayless get some play time after the trade dead-line - so hopefully we can recover Jack's lost 5 PPG from drives/FT. But - a good backup PF that scores in the post to replace Frye's jump-shooting minutes next to Joel (who only scores on put-backs or dunks) - would probably be a very big help. Maybe we can spend part of our cap-room on Paul Millsap for next year.
What he said. I was going to make all the same points, but BNM spared me having to research all the details...
This is true only when Joel is with the starters, who NEVER run a play for him. With Sergio he scores mostly on the break or the pick and roll.
Unfortunately, that's not true. When he was starting Joel had 3 games in double-digit points, since being moved to the 2nd units he only scored 10 points once and that was the Sacramento game where Greg had problems defending the King's long-range shooting bigs - so Joel spent a lot of time with the starters. If you look at Joel's shots (which, with his remarkable FG% is pretty much also his makes) - he gets about 35% of his shots from assists. Looking at the last games: @ Toronto - Joel got one assist from Sergio @ Boston - Joel got one assist from Roy @ Washington - Joel got one assist from Rudy @ NYK - Joel got one assist from Rudy @ Detroit - Joel got one assist from Roy The data, unfortunately, does not back your claims... - in the last 5 games Joel got 1 assist from Sergio.
